The Ideology Failure
Dispatches from Deena Stryker
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]mericans are reaping the consequences of their lack of ideological literacy. The media turned against Donald Trump once he became the Republican candidate, not because of his fascist tendencies, but because he refused to be ‘politically correct’, saying and doing things that candidates for the highest office in the land — or even a city council seat — would shun. As products of soap opera politics, candidates’ differences never go beyond the bounds of a very tight center-left and center-right, and the press follows. But while his sexist and anti-immigrant rants offended many, and deservedly so, especially in the identity/cultural segments of the population who have a very vocal and visible representation throughout the media and Hollywood liberals, the actual reason the media went on the warpath with a vengeance against Trump was his heretical questioning of NATO’s mission and financing, the supposed US inability to liquidate ISIS, and a lack of reliability concerning the War Party’s most critical issue, the continuation of its campaign of confrontation and war with Russia and any other nation contesting American global domination.
Although their governments tend to also practice centrism, a political position that entrenches the corporate status quo, European have a much better grounding in the many shades of gray between fascism and communism, philosophers having been ‘favorite sons’ since the mid-nineteenth century. (Even today, intellectuals in France are often admired as rock stars.) Trade unions, too, play a much more important role than they ever have in the US, competing with each other based on ideological fine points between communism and social democracy, with various versions of ‘socialism’ an ever wobbly three-legged stool. Donald Trump’s European political counterparts are also very different from the US Alt Right in that their platforms are underpinned with quotes from the work of ‘respectable’ right wing theoreticians.
Not only: when Gert Wilders in the Netherlands (a country that has historically been a paragon of tolerance), or Marine Le Pen in France, get up to speak, they denounce the stifling rule of Brussels as well as the presence of dark-skinned Muslims, making immigration part of a discussion about Europe. Is nationalism better than community, and should Europe be that of the Enlightenment, or of Hitler?
In the United States, there is no political ballast to sustain discussions of immigration, except for the narrowly defined ‘taking jobs away from Americans’ or ‘increasing delinquency’. There is not even a response to the fact that the US has always been a nation of immigrants, because ‘times have changed’ and machines do most of the work now. What matters is that, given the minority status of Caucasians across an ever more interdependent world, Trump is determined, via his Supreme Court picks, to reverse Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortions in a last-ditch effort to improve the number of white people on earth.
Had American journalists any real knowledge of trends other than neo-liberalism and ‘progressivism’, they would have been able to warn voters that nationalism and fascism are almost inseparable — but that would have forced them to take on both Hillary and Donald because an unquestioned and constantly abetted grand chauvinism is one of the American state’s self-legitimating pillars. Fact is, Hillary’s camouflaged fascism would have inexorably implemented the 1990s doctrine of ‘full spectrum dominance’, which includes tactical nuclear war with Russia. Washington’s goal has long been to carve that immense country up into manageable sized states with compliant rulers, and Hillary would not have hesitated to meet public objections with militarily armed police.
Trump’s fascism, while facing the same domestic resistance, will try to retain the support of America’s less privileged white workers by assuring them that they are ‘being taken care of’, for example in the new version of Obamacare that he is preparing (which is impossible, unless he pulls a 180 on this issue and decides to finally implement single payer, which would instantly make him one of the most popular presidents in recent history). For a while, it will suffice for him to contradict reality by having assistants look into specific complaints, while he locks in the pipelines he promised his backers and the coal mines he promised certain voters, projects which the MSM will faintly condemn, while ascribing them to neo-liberalism rather than fascism. It will not even recognize that like Hitler’s Anschluss, speed is the key. It will remember that Trump spoke about doing certain things within days of his inauguration, via executive orders, but will be unable to say so because that would show that they did not believe him, failing to warn voters that these things could actually happen.
It took Hitler’s movement more than ten years to gain power because it was opposed by relatively large left-wing movements (following the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was a short-lived Hungarian Commune in 1919, and the Socialists had widespread support in the Weimar Republic). But it took Trump only a year to match rhetoric with action, because his opponents were neo-liberals whom ‘the people’ despised. Like Hitler, who sent his troops first into Vienna, then in short order into Prague, Trump’s business plans were obviously drawn up in detail before his inauguration, so that in three days he was able to sign a handful of key decrees. It can also be argued that the imperial presidency is now effectively so powerful that any president would be able to sign these decrees, and get away with it (at least for a while), and that Obama could have done the same, for the authentic betterment of the masses, except that being a great and smooth dissembler the man was actually playing for the opposite team.
It’s not as though no president in recent memory has benefited from his party being in the majority in both the House and the Senate (not to mention state and local government). It’s that they had not thought to draft legislation in advance, coming to the presidency prepared to enter into the give and take of ‘representative government’ (however flawed). The fact that Trump’s campaign broke with all those who preceded it is only part of the story: his appeal to a largely untutored base was as indispensable as Hitler’s harangues were to the plan to regain ‘Lebensraum’ for the German master race, except that here Panzer divisions have been replaced with executive orders that preceding presidents were too fearful to use.
The Democrats’ propaganda shills in battle mode
The website change.org, where people can go to start petitions, is attacking President Trump’s media advisor, Steve Bannon, for supposedly ‘denouncing’ the first amendment when he writes: “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.” Surely, that is a valid criticism, but instead of doing its ‘mea culpa’, the press, as represented by change.org, continues to spout nonsense about the First Amendment guaranteeing ‘freedom of the press’.
At the time when this amendment was passed, ‘the press’ consisted of one man with a printing press. Today, however, ‘the press’ is a product owned by a concentrated web of corporate oligarchs, which takes advantage of the First Amendment to transmit whatever biased message it wants readers to believe. Salaried journalists present the corporations’ message and are in no way free to express their own, individual opinion. Let alone the truth, should they happen to see it. In fact, they would surely get fired for doing so. The corporate media, by its very nature, a longtime and automatic accomplice of the American ruling class in all its criminal imperial enterprises, is not a vessel to invest with the unconditional protections of the first amendment. Citizen journalists, yes. Corporate shills, no. Despite their imputed loftiness, laws are not sacred objects of veneration, repositories of eternal wisdom, and notions like the fourth estate being an honest oppositional force holding the feet of concentrated power to the fire is a despicable myth. From that perspective, and the fact that mega corporations—which the media all are—are NOT real persons, contrary to what a corporate-friendly supreme court advised, it is foolish to give much sympathy to the current cries of outrage emanating from the Clintonian-CIA controlled media. In this context, American citizens must learn to discriminate carefully what deserves and what does not deserve support, for all the major public voices are compromised and largely polluted at this point. I declare this because while Trump has already made some highly worrisome moves, and his style of rule is nothing if not liable to inflame instead of pacify tempers, Bannon and his opinion of the media is not entirely wrong, not wrong by a long shot. The American media is a disgrace inviting to be sidelined and replaced with Tweets whose 140 characters usually suffice to better inform the public than most deliberately poisoned ‘news reports’ or pundit commentary.
Some people with undeniable intellectual gravitas share Bannon’s low opinion and contempt for what passes for the Fourth Estate in the United States today. Paul Craig Roberts, whose views one may disagree with or applaud, depending on the case, but which are always expressed with sincerity and courage, has this to say about the state of “professional journalism” in the indispensable nation (bold red ours):
Bannon is correct that the US media—indeed, the entire Western print and TV media—is nothing but a propaganda machine for the ruling elite. The presstitutes are devoid of integrity, moral conscience, and respect for truth. https://www.rt.com/usa/375271-bannon-trump-media-cnn/ Read the comments in which morons define freedom of the press as the freedom to lie to the public.
Who else but the despicable Western media justified the enormous war crimes committed against millions of peoples by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes in nine countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and the Russian areas of Ukraine?
Who else but the despicable Western media justified the domestic police states that have been erected in the Western world in the name of the “war on terror”?
Along with the war criminals that comprised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the Western media should be tried for their complicity in the massive crimes against humanity.
The Western media’s effort to sustain the high level of tension between the West and Russia is a danger to all mankind, a direct threat to life on earth.
As for the meat and potatoes so far, according to the Fox News website this is what the Trumpian presidential steamroller has accomplished to date. Most of it is simply deplorable, to put it mildly. An object lesson in unhinged and reckless presidential power, exercised on delusional “facts” liable to benefit no one except a puny minority of immediately connected parties. But it is also showman’s flourish, in Trump’s mind, “proving” that he is a man of action, a man who by iron will and literally with the stroke of the pen, can accomplish things that apparently stumped the entire US political establishment and defeated lesser men. He is happy to be perceived as “delivering” on his electoral promises, something indeed without precedent in recent US history.
“The authorization of a U.S.-Mexico border wall; the stripping of federal grant money to sanctuary cities; hiring 5,000 more Border Patrol agents; ending “catch-and-release” policies for illegal immigrants; and reinstating local and state immigration enforcement partnerships.
“Two orders reviving the Keystone XL pipeline and Dakota Access pipelines. He also signed three other related orders that would: expedite the environmental permitting process for infrastructure projects related to the pipelines; direct the Commerce Department to streamline the manufacturing permitting process; and give the Commerce Department 180 days to maximize the use of U.S. steel in the pipeline.
“An order to reinstate the so-called “Mexico City Policy” – a ban on federal funds to international groups that perform abortions or lobby to legalize or promote abortion. The policy was instituted in 1984 by President Reagan, but has gone into and out of effect depending on the party in power in the White House. Trump also signed a notice that the U.S. will begin withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Trump called the order ‘a great thing for the American worker.’
“An order imposing a hiring freeze for some federal government workers as a way to shrink the size of government. This excludes the military, as Trump noted at the signing.
“An order that directs federal agencies to ease the “regulatory burdens” of ObamaCare. It orders agencies to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision or requirement” of ObamaCare that imposes a “fiscal burden on any State or a cost, fee, tax, penalty, or regulatory burden on individuals, families, healthcare providers, health insurers, patients, recipients of healthcare services, purchasers of health insurance, or makers of medical devices, products, or medications.”
So, yes, with the stroke of a pen, years of opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, culminating in Obama’s rejection, were erased, as were American Indian efforts, through freezing temperatures, to interrupt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Less than a week after Trump’s inauguration, it’s becoming clear that if ‘the people’ obey, they will have nothing to fear, as the 1% gets its way.
The big question now is whether Trump—despite his notorious zig-zags— will exercise his imperial pen to normalize relations with Russia, stop the Obama war infestations and spare the planet further bloodletting and the very real threat of a nuclear war.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
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